Summitgoers push for sustainable cities

Conference attendees say tearing up the pavement may be just one part of a post-oil urban future

Philip S. Wenz, Special to The Chronicle

Published 4:00 am, Saturday, May 10, 2008

Is there life after cars? Could your house be transformed into a unit in a mixed-use, multifamily building with a vegetable garden on the roof? Would you drink "toilet to tap" water - purified, recycled sewage - or would you rather die of thirst?

These questions and many others like them were asked - and at least partially answered - by an eclectic group of avant-garde designers, builders, planners, organizers, artists and mayors (including Gavin Newsom) from around the world. They gathered at the Ecocity World Summit conference in San Francisco last month to share their ideas and experiences in an effort to create sustainable cities - and there was a palpable sense of urgency in their voices as they spoke of climate change, water and food shortages, soil depletion, deforestation and poverty.

They had come from every continent not just to identify pressing problems but also to discuss solutions. And they tied the problems and solutions to the form and function of humanity's largest and most resource-intensive creations: cities.

As the conference's principal organizer, Richard Register, director of the Oakland nonprofit Ecocity Builders, put it in his opening message, "Now we are nearing a threshold. Will we cross into a whole other realm, a whole other way of building (cities) - for people instead of for the requirements of machines (cars)? ... Are we going to redesign and start shaping cities on the human measure and for ecological health, before relatively inexpensive energy goes away forever?"

His last remark referred to "peak oil," shorthand for an abrupt decline in petroleum availability and a topic well understood and widely discussed by the conferees.

If you've grown up hearing that "someday" we'll run out of oil, and believing that "someday" is a generation or more away, you might think we have enough time to develop new energy sources before the catastrophic economic consequences of oil depletion manifest themselves. But long before we run out of oil, we will pass the point where half the world's oil reserves are gone and only half are left in the ground - the peak of the oil production curve. Virtually all speakers at the Ecocity Summit, and a growing cadre of energy experts worldwide, believe that we have already reached that point - our oil production has peaked and is beginning to decline irrevocably while demand continues to grow exponentially.

A rapid decline

If the peak-oil adherents are correct, we will experience a steady and somewhat rapid decline in the amount of energy available for operating our global civilization or, addressing Register's concern, for rebuilding it in a sustainable way. Say our overall energy production diminishes at the rate of 1 percent per year. Within a decade, we would face some hard choices about how to allocate the remaining 90 percent of our available energy.

Is such a drastic reduction in overall energy availability possible? Remember that oil cost just $20 a barrel in 2002, and while price can be manipulated, it is basically determined by supply and demand.

The argument has been made, of course, that oil can and must be replaced for obvious environmental and geopolitical reasons. But the catch is that oil cannot be replaced; no other fuel is as energy intensive. Coal, which was burned at the beginning of the industrial revolution, was quickly abandoned when the superiority of oil as an energy source was discovered. Green is the future of energy, but green energy sources don't deliver anything like oil's punch per pound.

The only long-term solution is to significantly reduce our per-capita energy consumption (especially in the United States, which has 5 percent of the world's population and uses 25 percent of its oil). As former oil industry analyst Jan Lundberg asked at an Ecocity Summit panel on Energy and Economic Relocalization, "Why do you need all that energy, when what we should be doing is tearing up the pavement and replanting?"

While Lundberg's solution seems drastic, the overall conference theme of reversing our 60-year trend of sprawl development and building or redeveloping far more compact cities - before we run out of the energy and money to do so - is compelling.

In a handout prepared for his panel on "Why Better Cars Build Worse Cities," transportation expert Andy Kunz pointed out that Americans use eight times as much oil per capita as do Europeans. That's mainly because 70 percent of Americans live in car-dependent sprawl development, while 90 percent of Europeans live in cities and use public transportation, ride bikes or walk.

What will the ecocity of the (near) future look like? With more than 100 speakers at the conference, a final consensus was not reached - and, in any case, ecocities would be as varied as the bioregions where they're built.

Several themes

But some consistent themes emerged as the conference developed. First, cars pretty much have to go. The ecocity will be compact (therefore relatively vertical), accessible to pedestrians and serviced by public transportation. Along with cars, many of the single-family houses that make up our current sprawl cities will have to be abandoned in favor of multiunit housing.

Second, like natural ecosystems, ecocities, using solar energy, will produce and recycle many of their own necessities. Food will be grown in community gardens, and scraps will be composted to create more food. Water will be treated like the precious commodity it is - captured, retained, purified and reused.

Third, ecocities will be beautiful. When we recapture the space, infrastructure and embodied energy now given to cars - many cities are 40 percent or more pavement - we'll have ample room for nature in the city.

If the Ecocity Summit's collective vision appears naive, the conferees' collective response might be, "Take a look around you - the next time you're stuck in gridlock traffic and the next time you walk past a community garden planted in a vacant lot. Where would you rather be in 10 years, and which world will you bequeath to your children?"